M2M Intelligence Dials Deutsche Telekom Into Connecting Life & Work

Transformative business technology probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think telecommunications, at least not since you bought your first smartphone. In fact, the major global carriers are very much on the cutting edge. Earlier this month, OracleVoice contributor John Foley reported on AT&T’s advance into next-gen services such as “Digital Life.” Today, we’re going to dive into Deutsche Telekom’s leadership in bringing machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity to businesses and homes in Europe.

M2M intelligence emerges when data gathered from hundreds—sometimes thousands—of geographically dispersed digital sensors is routed across a telecom network back to an enterprise, and is then analyzed to surface information of business value. (I’ll provide some real-world examples below.) You might be wondering why M2M hasn’t previously emerged in a big way. That’s a logical question in light of the longtime prevalence of both computers and telecom networks.

The idea of connecting machines so they can intercommunicate has been around for ages, and it’s actually been actively implemented in one way or another within the industrial (aka factory) arena for several decades. It’s just now catching on more broadly. That’s partly because the build-out of over-the-air (as opposed to wired) data networks, driven over the past decade by smartphones, makes it possible to take M2M out of the factory and into the field. The real accelerator, though, has come from manufacturing advances, which now enable tiny digital sensors to be made so they can sell for less than a buck.

That’s one reason Deutsche Telekom can take to market an M2M solution that connects up to 5,000 farms throughout Europe. Sensors monitor the body temperature of cows, so that veterinarians don’t have to expend time and gas driving from farm to farm to check on them to determine when pregnant cows are due to give birth. Instead, the M2M network automatically sends the vets text messages when a calf is coming.

This is the kind of application Dr. Thomas Kiessling, Chief Product and Innovation Officer (CPIO) at Deutsche Telekom, is talking about when he formulates the definitional question about M2M. “How does it add value for a CIO?” he asks. “Does it improve productivity or your business model? Everything else is just hype.”

Indeed, Deutsche Telekom sees M2M as an important strategic initiative, and is making the serious capital investments required to make it a reality. “That’s important,” says Kiessling. “If you’re a mid-sized company running a fleet of trucks, you don’t want to have to buy $10 million in sensors and communications hardware to get started with M2M.”

Accordingly, Deutsche Telekom is offering M2M as a managed service. This sidesteps the need for customers to make big capex spends—always a serious bar to adoption, particularly with new technologies lacking widespread customer proof points. “We provide a Web portal where you can look at the basic data, and then hook in your systems,” he explains. “Let’s take the simple use case of a copier that’s empty; the system sends a message that it needs more toner. Where the fun starts is, we’ve connected up coffee machines. In an upscale restaurant, the espresso machine is a business-critical process. If it’s out for a couple of hours, that’s bad. So if it needs to be maintained, the M2M managed service would automatically send an SMS.”

To facilitate customers’ ability to rapid set up such scenarios, Deutsche Telekom has launched a do-it-yourself M2M Marketplace. The site enables customers to do all their service provisioning online.

Kiessling sees straightforward business adoption, with applications not dissimilar from the cows and copiers examples, as constituting the first wave of M2M adoption. “These are fun examples of simple productivity increases, which are possible just by connecting up your machines,” he says. “The second wave of M2M is going to be a mash-up of business and consumer.”

In this next phase, people will increasingly enter the equation. “We humans are going to turn into sources and sinks of real-time of data,” Kiessling says. That’s already happening in a nascent fashion with so-called “wearables,” which can monitor joggers’ heart rates and blood pressure.

But the biggest M2M opportunity likely lies in the health care market. (Taxonomically, this is a highly specialized business-to-business application, even though it scoops in data from consumers.) Health care is an area which will test M2M’s business mettle, because customers will require stricter service-level agreements. SLAs will have to commit to 24/7 uptime, because of the criticality of potential medical emergencies.

Kiessling says there aren’t many projects in this arena yet. However, as they begin to emerge, he believes that they’ll constitute a tipping point in terms of humans getting connected to the Internet.

More immediately, consumers’ biggest M2M touch points may come without them ever hearing that acronym. Home automation has been envisioned as a major market, in one form or another, for the past thirty years. Now, with appliance vendors boarding the M2M and Internet of Things bandwagons, it’s beginning to jell into a market.

Sensors will see domestic service in radiator thermostats, smoke detectors, blinds, lamps and household appliance, via what’s dubbed the QIVICON Smart Home platform. The venture, announced in September at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin, is a partnership of Deutsche Telekom with EnBW, eQ-3, Miele and Samsung. It includes some 25 home-appliance makers.

For Further Information:

To hear more about M2M directly from Deutsche Telekom chief product and innovation officer Thomas Kiessling himself, please go to this archived video from Oracle OpenWorld in September. Kiessling’s presentation, “M2M Unlimited—Connected Life & Work,” begins at the 16-minute mark.